We’ve been playing a bunch of games based on sports games before, mostly from these earlier eras – Summer Games II comes to mind – but the collection of minigames with a sports theme lasts in the modern day in the likes of Wii Sports. Other modern ones tend to feel like cash-ins, often for the Olympics, and so they’re really just filler that don’t really apply to the blog.

Hyper Sports, today’s sport minigame collection, got the Olympics license and branding in Japan only. As a game, it is the sequel to Track & Field and it introduces a number of different sports.

Our Thoughts

In the end, these games use the same patterns – here, too, there’s a lot of two button mashing to move fast (swimming here), and timed button presses for some jumps. They are simple – minigames or QTEs from modern games – and while they have an immediate rush of being able to get further, they don’t really offer much fun long term. Worse, there are some where the timing felt finicky enough that I rarely got past them – the long horse being one of these – and as there’s no real explanation of what you’re meant to do that I remember, there’s a lot of experimentation to figure out what button press goes where.

There’s a non-gameplay improvement that stood out. While it might not be the first, the game contains some synthesized speech to comment on the action.It doesn’t influence the game too much, but it’s a nice addition and it feels quite special that it’s in there in the first place.

Final Thoughts

Hyper Sports doesn’t offer large changes from the other sports games, but at least the collection of sports is not as standard as the others – swimming as the first speed mini game rather than some type of running feels a bit more special. I wish I could jump between sports more often or do them in a different order, but I guess that’s the difference between a home and arcade game. It’s progress.